Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This article studies spatial relational inference within the framework of mental model theory. It focuses on the phase of model construction for which two cognitive modelings currently exist (Berendt, 1996; Schlieder, 1995). Both refer to the aggregated results of a former experiment (Knauff, Rauh & Schlieder, 1995). However, conflicting evidence exists with respect to symmetry properties of model construction that makes the assessment of the cognitive adequacy of certain explanations impossible. We therefore conducted an experiment using computational tools provided by AI research on Qualitative Spatial Reasoning (QSR) to investigate whether the model construction process works the same from left to right and vice versa (symmetry of reorientation), and whether the processing of spatial relations depends on what was already processed (symmetry of transposition). Experimental results clearly indicate that the symmetry of transposition cannot be found in subjects' answers to indeterminate spatial four-term series problems and that the degree of reorientation symmetry is not perfect. The latter, however, can be entirely attributed to performance variation, since the responses of retested subjects to the same problems were only concordant to the same degree.